James Harrison did not much care for needles. Whenever he donated plasma, he would look away as the tip went into his arm.
But Mr. Harrison, an Australian who died last month at 88, was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.
“He just kept going, and going, and going,” his grandson Jarrod Mellowship, 32, said in an interview on Monday. “He didn’t feel like he had to do it. He just wanted to do it.”
Mr. Harrison — who was affectionately known as “The Man with the Golden Arm” — died in his sleep at age 88 on Feb. 17, at a nursing home about an hour’s drive north of his regular donation center in Sydney, Mr. Mellowship said.
Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained a rare antibody, anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
It helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.
The condition is uncommon: Only about 276 out of 100,000 live births have complications related to this type of blood incompatibility, the Cleveland Clinic said.
But doctors cannot predict whether such an incompatibility will lead to serious problems. So, in Australia, the practice is to offer the medication to all pregnant women with negative antibodies as a preventative measure, according to Lifeblood.
In Australia, that’s about 17 percent of the population, or about 45,000 women a year. In the United States, it’s about 15 percent, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Ms. Falkenmire said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”
Mr. Harrison sometimes met some of the women he helped, although most were strangers.
But two he knew well indeed. His daughter, Tracey Mellowship, received an anti-D injection made with Mr. Harrison’s plasma. So did his granddaughter-in-law, Rebecca Mellowship, who is married to Mr. Mellowship.
“It was special that I received dad’s anti-D,” Tracey Mellowship, 58, wrote in an email.
But his rare antibodies were only part of the puzzle. Mr. Harrison’s commitment was key. He donated about every two weeks from age 18 to age 81, first his blood and then his plasma.
Vacations did not stop him: He would stop in clinics across Australia when he and his wife, Barbara Harrison, traveled in their camper van. She was a prolific blood donor, too.
Neither did old age: He rode the train for more than an hour each way to get from his home outside Sydney to his regular donation center.
And he never missed an appointment, said Ms. Falkenmire, the Lifeblood spokeswoman, who talked to him during donations.
Partially, she said, they just enjoyed chatting. But he also welcomed the distraction: “He was petrified of needles,” she said. “He hated them.”
Mr. Harrison knew the importance of his work firsthand. At 14, he needed a lot of blood transfusions during a major lung surgery. The experience inspired him to donate and encourage others to donate, too.
“He would walk up to people who were donating for the first time and congratulate them, and tell them they were important and special,” Ms. Falkenmire said, “without revealing anything about his own donations.”
James Christopher Harrison was born on Dec. 27, 1936, in Junee, a small town in New South Wales, to Peggy and Reginald Harrison.
After he recovered from lung surgery, Mr. Harrison met his wife, the former Barbara Lindbeck, when he was a teenager. She was a teacher who died in 2005, Ms. Falkenmire said. He worked as a clerk in the regional railway authority and received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1999 for his donations.
Mr. Harrison is survived by his daughter, Tracey, and her husband, Andrew Mellowship; his grandsons Scott and Jarrod Mellowship; and Jarrod’s family: Rebecca, his wife, and their four children.
And also, maybe, 2.4 million babies — which Mr. Harrison never quite knew how to comprehend.
“Saving one baby is good,” he said, after his final donation in 2018. “Saving two million is hard to get your head around, but if they claim that’s what it is, I’m glad to have done it.”
Mr. Harrison’s wish, he liked to say, was that people would keep donating. Maybe even more than he did, Mr. Mellowship said: “Because then it means the world’s going in the right place.”
